Great Doctrines of the Bible—God the Father, God the Son/ Martyn Lloyd Jones

20. The Covenant of Grace in the Old Testament 

Covenant is “an agreement or a pact which is entered into by two parties, the two parties generally being more or less of equal standing,” and “in the covenant two sides bind themselves to the fulfillment of certain promises given on the basis of certain conditions” (224). Jones underscores that “the thing that we must keep in mind is that the priority of God must be emphasised. The covenant is a gift of from God which has been ushered in by the death of Christ, and because it comes from God it is something which is certain, and inviolable, and unbreakable” (226). Originally God made a covenant with Adam, but he failed, so “from there on God made a new covenant, which is called the covenant of grace” (226). First of all, God has “promised to be a God unto man,” “certain temporal as well as spiritual blessings,” and “a way of justification” which includes “the promise of life eternal, the giving of the Spirit, and the full application and working out of redemption in my sanctification and ultimate glorification” (227). And “we are called upon to respond by faith, by the desire for all this, and by faithfulness and obedience to God in these new conditions” (227). 

For Jones, Genesis 3:15 is the announcement of the gospel: “I will put enmity between you and the woman,/ and between your offspring and her offspring;/ he shall bruise your head,/ and you shall bruise his heel.” Humans cannot be saved if they are friends of devil and enemy of God, so they must first become an enemy of the devil. Besides, God promised to help man to fight against the enemy. And the real seed of the woman is the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Secondly, the covenant God made with Noah in Genesis 9 tells us that God promised that the force of nature would be bridled, and man was protected against the violence both of man himself and beasts. This is “simply a temporary legislation,” “common grace” (230). 

Thirdly, “there was the covenant made with Abraham” in Genesis 17 (230). It was by Abraham’s faith that he entered in to the covenant and began to receive the blessings. Not only the promise concerning the land, there was “the great promise of a spiritual seed, that all the nations of the world were going to be blessed in Him” (231). Romans tells us that “Abraham was justified by faith, justified in a spiritual sense—justified from sin, he was forgiven, he was adopted into God’s family, and made the father of the faithful, the father of all believers” (231). 

Fourthly, the Sinaitic covenant in Exodus 19 was made through Moses. This is “a national covenant, and from here onwards the church and the nation became one” (231). Those who transgressed the law was put to death. You can divide the law into threefold manner: “the moral law, the civil law and the ceremonial law, that is, the certain great, fixed principles of morality, the special legislation for the life of the nation, and the laws governing the ceremonies and the ritual” (232). According to Galatians 3:17, the covenant of Mount Sinai “did not interfere to the slightest extent with the great covenant of promise and of grace that God had made with Abraham” (232). The law was “meant to increase the consciousness of sin,” and it was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ (233). In other words, it showed us the utter necessity of Christ and our absolute need of him” (233).